Layered shell-like structure such as layered composite materials have been used in many applications in engineering products from a patio to an airplane. One of the characteristics of layered or stacked shell-like structure is that the material properties vary from one layer to another layer in the thickness direction. An example layered shell-like structure is a sandwich plate system 200 shown in FIG. 2. It is noted that the thickness of a layered shell-like structure is generally small comparing to dimensions of the in-plane directions.
Computer aided engineering (CAE) analysis has been used for helping engineers and scientists to design products including products having layered shell-like structure. Example CAE includes finite element analysis (FEA), boundary element analysis (BEA), etc. One of the requirements for using CAE is to represent the product with a computerized mesh model. Prior art approaches to create such a computerized mesh model with different element types and/or material properties over the thickness have been tedious and/or ad hoc. For example, an interactive graphical pre-processor is required for users to manipulate the computerized mesh model. Therefore, it would be desirable to have an improved method for creating computerized mesh model for layered shell-like structure.